"The reason we built the calculator with these inputs is that we found these specific characteristics to be most predictive of a developer's salary, tabs or spaces notwithstanding," Stack Overflow said in a post Tuesday. "There are also more subjective ways that coders are evaluated and compensated. We at Stack Overflow have written publicly about how that happens here but we don't take that kind of skills assessment into account in this current model."

Among the input factors, geography has a significant impact, Stack Overflow said, offering this graphic as proof that U.S. coders enjoy a special status among worldwide developers:

The type of developer is also important, as data shows DevOps specialists earn top dollar, followed by data scientists, embedded applications/devices developers, quality assurance engineers and Web developers.